"Several individuals" at the Maine State Prison in Warren have tested positive for tuberculosis, but "there are no confirmed active cases," says Denise Lord, deputy Maine Corrections commissioner.

"The medical department is totally playing it down and treating the guys who are positive as if it is nothing out of the ordinary," an inmate who wished to remain anonymous recently wrote to Judy Garvey of the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition. "It's kind of scary. I would like to not catch TB in here!"

But a positive skin test generally means only "the TB germ is within you," says Dr. Stephen Sears, the state epidemiologist at the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. "The vast majority do not get sick." (And sometimes there are false positives.)

A positive test doesn't mean the TB is communicable or even has to be treated, Sears says. Starting treatment would depend on such factors as the person's age and other health problems.

TB bacteria usually infect the lungs but can infect other parts of the body. Before the development of antibiotics, TB was a major killer in the United States; it still is in poorer countries.

Although Sears's agency is working with Corrections to deal with the infection, he didn't know how many prisoners have tested positive nor how many were being treated. Lord didn't provide those numbers by deadline.

"Inmates are routinely screened for TB and systems are in place to monitor TB at the prison," she says.

The Cumberland County Jail administrator, Major Francine Breton, says an inmate with a cough three years ago had active TB. He was cured with antibiotics, she says. Positive tests at the jail are "regular occurrences." Most inmates staying longer than two weeks are tested, she says.

Sears says 3 to 4 percent of the Maine population would typically test positive. That would amount to as many as 52,000 people in the state and 37 among the prison's 920 inmates, although prisons are generally infected at a higher rate. HIV infection, substance abuse, and uncontrolled diabetes increase the risk of TB. Nine active TB cases were reported in Maine last year.

Any danger to prison inmates, staff, or visitors? "Not at this point," Sears says.

Pushing to remove shackles from pregnant prisoners It sounds almost too cruel to be true: a woman inmate is shackled to a hospital bed while delivering her baby. Sadly, hundreds of women across the country endure that humiliation, an unthinkable indignity for an already downtrodden group.

AG exonerates guards Critics of the state's prison system will press for an independent investigation after expressing dismay with the attorney general's long-delayed conclusion October 28 that Maine State Prison inmate Victor Valdez died last November from "a natural death."

Penal future The few things that Republican Governor-elect Paul LePage was reported as saying on crime-and-punishment issues during the campaign mostly sounded harsh and, of course, right-wing.

At a turning point When Joseph Ponte was told that Maine's longtime corrections commissioner Martin Magnusson had once informed the Legislature's Criminal Justice Committee, after a dramatic hostage-taking, that there were "probably 300 inmates right now with a weapon in their hand" — and that nobody at the committee meeting seemed disturbed by this information — Ponte's reaction was "I would be extremely perturbed by that."

'No-touch torture' in New Jersey Deane Brown, a Maine inmate shipped out of state because of his criticism of the Maine State Prison, is now being held in New Jersey in "one of the most repressive" prison units in the country, often reserved for "political" or activist prisoners like black radicals, says Bonnie Kerness of the American Friends Service Committee's national Prison Watch.

Mentally ill inmates need more help Prisoner advocates would like the new Corrections commissioner to strengthen his reform of the Maine State Prison by giving more care to the many mentally ill prisoners he is releasing from often-lengthy solitary confinement into the prison's general population.

Ledge Lessons As advocates of higher education and living as long as medically possible, we were sad to read that, according to new-media-powerhouse Web site the Daily Beast, Greater Boston is home to not one but five of the most stressful colleges in the United States.

Rhode Island’s birth control contretemps Recently OB-GYN Associates, a respected women's health care practice with offices in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, admitted to Rhode Island Department of Health officials that it had implanted in patients birth control intrauterine devices (IUDs) apparently manufactured in Canada and not approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

SUBVERSIVE SUMMER | June 18, 2014 Prisons, pot festivals, and Orgonon: Here are some different views of summertime Maine — seen through my personal political lens.

LEFT-RIGHT CONVERGENCE - REALLY? | June 06, 2014 “Unstoppable: A Gathering on Left-Right Convergence,” sponsored by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, featured 26 prominent liberal and conservative leaders discussing issues on which they shared positions. One was the minimum wage.

STATE OF POLARIZATION | April 30, 2014 As the campaign season begins, leading the charge on one side is a rural- and northern-Maine-based Trickle-Down Tea Party governor who sees government’s chief role as helping the rich (which he says indirectly helps working people), while he vetoes every bill in sight directly helping the poor and the struggling middle class, including Medicaid expansion, the issue that most occupied the Legislature this year and last.

MICHAEL JAMES SENT BACK TO PRISON | April 16, 2014 The hearing’s topic was whether James’s “antisocial personality disorder” was enough of a mental disease to keep him from being sent to prison.